(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a liquid crystal display. More particularly, the present invention relates to a liquid crystal display having fewer data driving circuits, and which prevents cross-tall, generated during column inversion driving.
(b) Description of the Related Art
A liquid crystal display is one of the most widely used flat panel displays. The liquid crystal display includes two display panels each having field-generating electrodes such as a pixel electrode and a common electrode, and a liquid crystal layer interposed therebetween. The liquid crystal display induces an electric field in the liquid crystal layer by applying a voltage to the field generating electrodes, and determines the alignment of liquid crystal molecules of the liquid crystal layer to control polarization of incident light through the display panels, thereby displaying an image.
The liquid crystal display also includes a plurality of signal lines such as gate lines and data lines in order to supply a voltage to a respective pixel electrode by controlling a switching element connected to the respective pixel electrode. The gate line transfers a gate signal generated from a gate driving circuit, and the data line transfers a data voltage generated from a data driving circuit. The switching element transfers a data voltage to the respective pixel electrode according to the gate signal.
The gate driving circuit and data driving circuit are directly mounted on one of the two display panels in the form of a plurality of integrated circuit (“IC”) chips. Alternatively, the gate driving circuit and data driving circuit are mounted on a flexible circuit layer and the flexible circuit layer is attached to one of the display panels. Such an IC chip is responsible for a large percentage of a manufacturing cost of a liquid crystal display. Particularly, since the data driver IC chip is much more expensive than a gate driving circuit IC chip, it is necessary to reduce the number of IC chips for a high resolution and large-sized liquid crystal display. The manufacturing cost of the gate driving circuit can be reduced by integrating the gate driving circuit with the display panel having the gate lines, data lines and switching elements. However, it is very difficult to integrate the data driving circuit with the display panel because the data driving circuit has a complicated structure. Therefore, a reduction of the number of data driver ICs is required.